Man's Hope

by Zellmann, William

  "Do you still consider yourself an American?"

  "Yes, of course. I love my country, and I served her in Iraq. The fact that certain political factions there are pursuing me doesn't change that."

  "How much has all this cost you?"

  "So far, I estimate about two billion dollars. I still have quite a few millions to spend before this is over, I think."

  "Your boosters are Russian, too. Does that mean they're backing you?"

  "No. As I have said, we have received no support from any government. By the way, the boosters are Ukrainian, not Russian. The Russian core stage, with its original Energia booster was included in the original sale, and it was the most powerful booster ever made. I bought the Ukrainian strap-ons because I couldn't buy American ones, due to the technology transfer laws, and because the Ukrainian ones were powerful enough, and were designed to mate to the Energia core stage."

  "Those supposed 'strap ons' are really missiles, aren't they?"

  "No. They are Ukrainian Zenit 3 three stage launch rockets, typically used to launch commercial satellites. I recommend Google if you would like to verify that. They will serve as the first, second, and third stage motors, after which they will be jettisoned, to parachute back to Earth for possible reuse. Since their predecessors were originally designed to work with the Energia/Buran as strap-ons, and were powerful enough for our purposes, we purchased them."

  "Do you deny that your ship contains a bomb you're planning to drop on the U.S. from orbit?"

  Frank laughed aloud. "Hell, Yes, I deny it. That would be about the stupidest way I can think of to deliver a bomb. Spend two billion dollars and over a year building a spacecraft, just so you can launch it into space and drop a bomb? Excuse me sir, but have you ever heard of airplanes? Does the name Wright Brothers ring a bell? How did you get here today, walk?" He shook his head. "This interview is over."

  Most of the questions were more friendly than that or neutral, though a number of them could have been called 'hard ball' if he had not been so forthcoming.

  By the time the last reporter left, though, Frank was talked out and worn out. The crowd outside was beginning to thin, and the airstrip was busy.

  Susan came in with a cold beer. "How did it go? You look exhausted."

  He blew a huge sigh. "I am. But it went all right, except for some idiot that managed to sneak in, somehow. Accused me of having a bomb on the Hope and planning to drop it on the U.S. I swear, some peoples' IQ's are lower than their shoe sizes!"

  Susan laughed. "You should see some of the mail. 'Man was given dominion over the Earth, not space or other planets. Space travel is defiance of God's plan.' Or how about, 'The answer is not in space; it's in appropriate technology and sun and wind power.' Or maybe this one: 'How could you declare war on your own country after all it's done for you?' And those are just some of the more printable ones. Some of them look like they were printed in pencil by a ten-year-old, and some even misspell the curse words. It's amazing."

  Overall, though, it seemed the day was a success. Frank's blockbuster announcement had captured the imagination of the world. Oh, there were a few headlines like, "Weatherly threatens to destroy all life on Earth," but they were few. Most seemed to take his plan at face value, and scrambled to consult scientists of various types for their stories. Frank released videos of his speech on YouTube within the hour, and it was receiving so many hits that YouTube's servers were almost overwhelmed.

  NASA and the Russian Federal Space Agency both reminded the media that they were pursuing 'responsible' projects to Mars and the asteroid belt, and expressed doubts that Frank's 'radical' plan would work, though they expressed no specific objections.

  Work also proceeded frantically on the supply ship, an unmanned cargo canister mounted on a Russian Proton-M booster Gorneliev had managed to obtain from Khrunichev, complete with its attached Briz third stage. This combination was expected to allow them to launch over 6 metric tons of supplies, including several ion engines. If his money lasted, Frank also hoped to send either a second supply ship or the Man's Dream when the comet emerged from behind the Sun.

  It was almost launch day when theU.S.appealed to the International Court of Justice to ban the launch, because it would be irresponsible to direct an asteroid on a possible collision course with Earth.

  "Don't worry, Frank," Gilberto Almendes, the Brazilian Minister of Space told him. "We're already preparing a response, that the court lacks jurisdiction over this matter, and that the asteroid will be under control at all times, and guided by ion engines. We'll drag it out well past the launch date, don't worry."

  The launch date continued to approach inexorably. Man's Hope was mated with the Energia core stage and moved to the launch tower, and ships began delivering tanks of fuel; refined kerosene, known as RP-1, for the Zenits, liquid hydrogen for the core stage, and liquid oxygen as oxidizer for both.

  Frank and Dr. Ternayev had considered converting the core stage to use RP-1 instead of the much harder-to-handle liquid hydrogen. But they had decided that since they would be unable to launch test flights, any such modifications would be an unjustified risk.

  Frank was in his office poring over load reports when a young man in a white jacket stuck his head in the door. "Senhor Weatherly?" he asked.

  Frank nodded and replied "Yes." Suddenly there was a large pistol in the man's hand. Frank groped for his "panic button" just as there was a "chuff" sound, and Frank looked down to see a tranquilizer dart in his shoulder. He started to speak, but collapsed, unconscious.

  Frank awoke on the floor of his office. His head was resting in Susan's lap, and he reflected that it was a nice place to be, before he remembered the man in white. "What . . . ?"

  Susan looked at him with eyes shiny with unshed tears. "Frank!" she cried. "Oh, Frank, I was so worried . . ."

  A pair of uniformed legs came into his view, and Frank looked up to see General Genesa. "Ah, you are awake," said the General. "We have the man. He actually does work here; that is how he could get access. He had a wheelchair in the hall, and an ambulance at the door. You did well, managing to hit your panic button before you passed out."

  Frank started to sit up, but he was still groggy. "Who sent him?" he asked.

  The General shrugged. "I doubt we will ever know. All the man knows is that he was to deliver you to a boat in the Baia. His description could fit anyone, even me. The boat is gone, of course."

  The grogginess was fading. "Damn!" Frank said angrily, "That means we'll have to enhance the security again! I hate having guards everywhere."

  The General grinned sourly. "Still, I am afraid we will have to place guards on the entrances of any building you or Ms. Andrews occupy. Perhaps once the launch is complete in a few days, we will be able to relax a bit."

  Frank nodded. "I hope so, General," he said dispiritedly. He put an arm around Susan and led her out of the now-crowded office.

  They passed David in the doorway, as he came pounding down the corridor at a dead run. Frank just gave him a weak smile and led Susan down the hall to their room.

  General Genesa came out the door. He nodded to David and then stared down the hall at the receding figures. "It must be very difficult to know that your own government considers you an enemy, and would try to kidnap you."

  David nodded. "Especially if you're an American. Our traditions, our core beliefs make it almost impossible for an American to conceive of such a situation. Hell, I would never have believed it, until now. I'm afraid we're going to have some very depressed Americans around here for a while, General."

  By the time they reached their quarters, tears were streaming down Susan's face.

  "It's all right, Susie," said Frank. "I'm all right. Everything is under control.

  She whirled on him. "NO!" she cried. "Everything is not all right. Everything is not under control. My country, the damned United States of America, just sent someone to kidnap one of their own citizens!"

  Frank grabbed her shoulders. "N
o!" he said in an intense tone. "It wasn't your country that sent that man. It was not the United States. It was the government of the United States. A collection of bureaucrats who have lost sight of what America is about, and what America means. You have to remember that, Susie. You have to believe that one day that vast, sleeping horde of people will wake up and see what has been done to the founder's dream. Then, I suspect, there will be a second American Revolution. I pray that it will be a revolution at the ballot box; that suddenly nearly every incumbent federal and state officeholder will be thrown out, and dedicated people who want America back will take over. That they will fire nearly every senior bureaucrat in the system, and replace him or her with people dedicated to the greatness of America. I pray that's the kind of revolution we will have, Susie. But I very much fear that there will be another, bloodier kind. That frightens me, because that could easily lead to tyranny, and the actual fall of the American Empire."

  She looked annoyed. "Empire? We don't have an empire."

  He shrugged. "Ask your Brazilian friends. Ask Anton, or Sergei. Ask Ron Mbele. Our experiment in freedom has led us to greatness, dear, but it has also led us to empire. And empires have life spans. Rome achieved greatness as a republic; but Augustus, for the best of reasons, of course, seized power and turned it into a dictatorship. Four hundred years later, Gauls were sacking Rome.

  "I'm afraid that a bloody second revolution would lead to an American Augustus seizing power, for the best of reasons, of course.

  "But if we quit now, if we give up on America, then all hope of a world of free men will be gone. Along with Man's Hope, America stands for man's dream of Freedom. Don't give up on America yet!"

  Susan's eyes were shining, but tears no longer marred her cheeks. She sniffed. "You give a nice speech. You ever thought of running for office?"

  He grinned. "Nope. I don't qualify. I wasn't sitting in the front row when my parents got married."

  But things were too hectic to worry about political philosophy. Within an hour both Frank and Susan were deeply embroiled in the frantic launch preparations. The space suits, designed and manufactured in Japan, had to be tested, and tested, and then tested again, this time on the spacers that would be wearing them. The spacers themselves had been training day and night in a swimming pool on the launch site, with weights strapped to them to provide exactly neutral buoyancy, and air delivered through umbilicals to helmets designed to resemble those of the space suits.

  In one way, though, David decided that the Man's Hope crew had it easier than NASA's astronauts did.

  NASA's missions are largely scientific and experimental in nature. NASA astronauts were continually being poked, prodded, and monitored by medical staff.

  Here, they were simply given comprehensive physical examinations to make certain they were in good health, and their medical records fed to Raoul's tablet computer. David reveled in the lack of sensor pads stuck all over his body all the time.

  The tablet computers had been purchased from Japan. They were top-line off-the-shelf models, though with enlarged memory capacity. But the ship's computers had been designed to interface with them through the SD card slot each possessed. Unplugged, they were simply the tablets they had started out to be. In fact, each spacer had a stack of SD cards in his meager baggage allowance, each crammed with music, movies, books, or whatever else took the owner's fancy. But plugged into the adapter, the tablet became a workstation on the ship's intranet. Each spacer had a private partition on the main system, tailored to their needs. Raoul's contained the psych profiles and medical histories of the crew, as well as medical references. Dolf's and David's contained the most storage; Dolf's full of astronomical data and orbit-calculation software, and David's with much of the same software, but packed with details about the operation and maintenance of the ship, as well as the complete psych profiles of the crew instead of the astronomical data.

  But each partition also contained space for the spacers to record occurrences, observations, and anything else they cared to add. A single docking station was provided for those who felt more comfortable with a conventional keyboard than the touch screen.

  The tablets were popular with all the spacers, but Dolf was inseparable from his tablet, even before liftoff. He swore that he was finally going to write that textbook on orbital mechanics he'd been planning for years. He was often heard to complain about the fact that the PC in his quarters was not equipped with the interface. Somehow, he'd managed to accumulate nearly half a kilo of SD cards in his personal baggage.

  Soichiro, called "Yoshi" for no reason anyone could figure out, seemed to take a personal pride in the tablets and their interface with the onboard system. Apparently, he had been involved in the design of one or the other. Any mild complaint about the tablet system sent him into frenzied action to resolve the problem, no matter how trivial it was. When not actively training, he strutted around the computer building, shouting at people and ordering them around like a General. Frank suspected that the computer staff would be gladder than most when the ship lifted off.

  Ron Mbele seemed nearly as attached to his tablet as Dolf was. His long fingers could be seen caressing its case when he became distracted. His partition contained details on nearly every mechanical system aboard, and he spent any free moment reviewing the information.

  Yuri was Deputy Commander and Payload Specialist, but his partition was mostly filled with information on the operation and maintenance of the small nuclear reactor they were smuggling, which was also his responsibility. His military duties had included training and limited experience with nuclear submarine reactors, so he at least had more than a layman's familiarity with nuclear power. At any rate, he was the best Frank had.

  As the clock ticked down to launch day, the Alcântara Launch Station came to resemble a kicked anthill, with frantic activity going on everywhere.

  On launch day minus four, the supply ship was launched. Under remote control from Alcântara, it would send its payload ahead toward the comet. Once it arrived, its onboard computer would put it into orbit around the comet, where it would await the arrival of Man's Hope, with the precious cargo that would permit them to live through their trip around the Sun.

  Finally, the day had come. The spacers gathered for their final briefing before heading off to get suited up.

  Frank gave a short pep talk, but he knew they had heard it all before, so he restrained his enthusiasm. But there was no doubt as he simply finished, "All of you know I would give my last dollar to be going with you. But an old fart like me would just endanger the mission. Go, with my blessing and the hopes of mankind." He turned abruptly and left, his eyes wet with unshed tears.

  David stood and moved to the front of the room. "All right," he began, "We've been over this a dozen times. One last time, and I'll shut up, I promise." There were chuckles and hoots of derision.

  David waved a hand, and silence fell. "All right. Liftoff positions. I'm in the pilot's seat, Yuri is in the second seat, and you passengers are tied down in your seats below, so Yoshi can't play with the pretty knobs and stuff." More hoots and laughter as Yoshi smiled shyly.

  "Okay. Control lights off the big candle, and suddenly we all weigh as much as Raoul. Luckily, for us it's only a few minutes!"

  He turned serious. "Here's where the big kicker comes in. We would like it a lot if we could haul the core stage into space with us, and we've got beefed up strap-ons to help us do it.

  "The trouble is, nobody knows for sure whether it'll work or not. All we know for sure is that the original strap-ons and core stage were not enough to get the original Buran into GTO, Geostationary Transfer Orbit. The Original orbiter had to have a 67 meter-per-second burn to achieve a stable LEO, low earth orbit. Now, we think we're lighter than the original, and we have three-stage strap ons instead of singles, and we'll be driving straight out, instead of trying to insert into LEO, so we think we might be able to blow right past GTO and straight to TLI, Trans Lunar Insertion. But think is not
the same as do. So, Anton fixed me up with this nifty panic button.

  "The computers are programmed to drop the boosters, but not the core stage. If the core stage runs out of fuel before we reach GTO or even TLI, I can punch the panic button and dump it. But I'm with Frank on this one. It would be very cool to hang onto that big ol' tank and those big ol' engines, since we're going to a place with lots of hydrogen and oxygen. Think of it as our lifeboat, a way to get a lift back if something goes wrong.

  "Besides, I don't really want to spend ten months or a year getting to that damned comet. Ion engines are neat, but they're really wimpy. Yes, we'll have constant boost, but at .001G. So I'm hoping those big Energia mothers give us a great big boost toward that comet before they run out of gas. We all know how NASA does it; boost to Low Earth Orbit, hang around there until Houston says you can burn for GTO, then wait there awhile until they decide you can boost for Lunar Insertion. Well, as Frank keeps saying, we aren't NASA. Control's computers are set up to sling us straight into TLI and on toward the comet, if the fuel holds out.

  "If not, they have several alternative programs to put us into GTO or TLI, if necessary. There, we'll light off the ion engines and head for the comet ourselves. Trouble is, we might have to wait a few orbits to get everything set up. We'll be watched by telescopes all over the world, which means we can't light off the reactor without it being spotted.

  "So, that's when you guys downstairs start to earn your pay. You guys will go outside (I hate the term 'EVA'!) and start spreading all those neat roll-up solar panels Frank bought. That should impress our viewers, and it will let us start up the ion engines, as soon as Yuri is done lighting off the reactor. Timing may be a bit tricky. We can't light off the ion engines until Yuri gets the reactor set up, but as soon as it is operating properly, it starts putting out radiation, without cover from the ions. Yuri, as soon as that thing starts putting out, you get your ass away from behind those ion boosters, and let me know I can fire them up."